My life after Fleet Street from Dacre to Fayed via Fergie and the murky corridors of Buck House
LURED: Mohamed Fayed with Sarah Ferguson
Eighty Up, Part Two…now, where was I? Ah yes, 1995 in the Cellars Hotel, Hohenort, on South Africa’s beautiful Cape. I had left home with assurances from Nick Lloyd that when I returned I would be deputy editor in succession to Paul Potts. Well, the editor’s indecision is final and when I called him during the trip he told me, and I quote verbatim: “I’ve had to give it to Craig Mackenzie”.
Craig!!!! I went straight to the fax machine and sent my resignation. Back in the office a few days later I was called in by CEO Andrew Cameron, the ceo, who sent me on my way with several wheelbarrows full of money, my car and pension pot, all intact.
So the rest of my life was about to begin. Early one morning I was summoned to a strange interview at 11.30pm with Paul Dacre who had contacted me through Geoff Levy. A few days later it was breakfast with Jonathan Holborow, then running the Mail on Sunday. When Dacre heard I had been offered a job by his fellow editor, he threw a paddy of such proportions (though not one of his vagina monologues) that I feared for his wellbeing.
The result? I was lured into the spider’s web spun by Mohamed Fayed. He had already snared Andrew Neil, Stewart Steven, Brian Hitchen and most of Fleet Street’s finest (I exclude the snake Steven from the compliment). Fayed wanted to buy a newspaper and that was to be my task.
Rupert Murdoch was thinking of selling Today and so I set about getting it. All went well; we agreed to keep printing at Wapping and News Group said we could work from there for a year. One morning as I was leaving home for the funeral of Tim Holder, whom I still mourn, the phone rang and Les Hinton (Rupert’s representative on earth) informed me the boss had changed his mind. Why? “I promise you”, he said, “ I have no idea, he can be very fickle”.
We tried to buy LBC from Reuters and that went well until the Radio Authority decided Fayed would not be a fit and proper owner of a respectable broadcaster. How right they were.
Then came the new Sunday paper which I have chronicled here before. Suffice to say even the efforts of, among others, Christopher Wislon, the late Bill Hagerty, John Hill and Kate Hadley, and the overwhelming approval of the ad agencies, were not enough to convince Fayed once I pointed out that he would need to dig very deep to see off Associated. So he then decided to go for Punch, dead for years and for good reason. I was off, still thinking of Mohamed as a strange but mildly entertaining ringmaster.
Little did I know.
I spent the next three months in Smith Square at Tory Central Office, among other things, ghost writing articles for regional papers for John Major. It will be filed under (with apologies to Spike Milligan): ‘John Major: My Part in his Downfall’.
Then came my internet millionaire phase, proving that even a full page in The Times cannot always tell the full story. Neil Mackwood (fotp) and I had started one of the very first property search sites on the web. Those were the days of dial-up connections when getting online seemed to take most of a week. I poured a fortune into the project and eventually we floated on AIM but a lovely piece in The Times by Gill Martin (fotp), headlined ‘The Cyber Millionaires’, was little premature.
My shares were worth £8million but as a founder and ceo I was locked in and couldn’t sell my stock. By the time I could, Rightmove had come along and blown us out of the water.
So I tried my hand, as one does, at PR — or as they call it these days — Crisis Management. My first client was Frank Timis, founder of Regal Petroleum. Frank had fled Romania at the age of 15 after his father was killed by the forces of Ceausescu, the last of the Kremlin stooges.
He took a ship to Perth wearing a ski suit and arrived in 110C heat. Speaking no English, he started work as a labourer for a mining company and by 25 he was a millionaire (and unlike me, not a paper one).
He was a dream client, generous, fun and with a great back story, most notably having two heroin convictions and the City pages loved writing about him. He donated millions to charity and funded a cancer research start-up.
Then he ran out of cash. Down to just a few million (but now a billionaire apparently.)
On one of several visits to Sierra Leone where he owned mines I flew with him in an ancient army helicopter for a 60-minute flight with half the country’s cabinet, most of them smoking despite an internal auxiliary fuel tank. On which I was perched.
Mike Ashley of Sports Direct was another extremely rich client who took a delight in demanding my services every time I tried to take a weekend away, or even a short holiday. But unlike Frank, he held on to his money.
The increasingly disturbing Sarah Ferguson, whom I first met in 1982, asked me join her charity Children in Crisis as a trustee. This involved a trips to Buck House and having to find my way in the dark along vast corridors lit by a single 60-watt bulb (the late Queen was very frugal, at least in some respects including paying her staff no more than a living wage). Everything Fergie did seemed ill-judged; we know that now but 30 years ago she was still viewed as a bit of gal.
At one of her black-tie charity dinners, the chaps had to answer a series of questions put by the awful Jeremy Beadle. Only four who answered correctly were left (thankfully not Levy, Peter Tory, who were on my table, or me). That quartet were asked on to the stage where they were instructed to drop their trousers. Alas, my pal Howard Aylett was among them and The Sun’s Arfer Edwards had his trustee Nikon at the ready.
The following morning the startled Aylett filled most of Page Three. He still blames me.
That’s the very brief (and mercifully censored) history of the years post DX. I’m now working on my third book, dealing with the relationship between Churchill and Beaverbrook and writing a column for the Drone among other things. On which point I should remind Lord Drone that Samuel Johnson once said: “Only a blockhead who writes for nothing is worth nothing”.
Blockheads of the world unite!
*****
I favour the definition of an Orangeman as “An Irish man who wishes he was an English man, so he dresses up as a Scottish man to march in honour of a Dutch man”. No mention that their idol, King William of Orange, was probably bisexual; that wouldn’t go down too well with the Free Presbyterians who fill their ridiculous ranks.
Today the Orange Order is a shrivelled hulk of its former self, all strutting and powerful until the Good Friday agreement changed everything, however slowly. Its supporters are a motley bunch of old men in bowler hats, younger men like Jamie Bryson, who has a prison term on his cv, and the evil Jeffrey Donaldson, now languishing in his cell at Maghaberry Prison. And the DUP’s Jim Shannon, facing a charge of assaulting a woman. Nice God-fearing people.
Less than two months ago, the brilliantly successful Fleadh Cheol na hEireann, the celebration of Irish music and dance, transformed Belfast with one million visitors from the world over and brought an extra £80 million into the coffers. Now we have the sight of the Orange Order trying for the first time in 28 years to march through a Nationalist area of Portadown to try to show they are still the Protestant masters over the poor bloody serfs.
Predictably, since last weekend there has been a stand-off occupying the time of judges, the PSNI chief constable and the Ulster Secretary, Chris Bryant. A total and expensive waste of time when the only outcome is a reminder of old unhappy days.
The Orangemen know time has moved on and that the game is up. I hope this is their final fitful stirrings, like a headless chicken still running in ever decreasing circles around the farmyard.
*****
AND FINALLY
I learn that Lord Beaverbrook once favoured a black cab for his chauffeured transport, one he owned rather than hailed. He even took it with a grandson for the journey from Cherkley to Nice. Rather him than me.
Other Hackney cab owners have been Stephen Fry, Prince Philip, my old friend Brian Basham who had his fitted with leather upholstery and air con. The hugely wealthy eccentric and heroic Anglophile Nubar Gulbenkian (as an Allied agent he organised a network to get stranded soldiers and airmen out of Vichy France and back to England) was a devotee.
“It turns on a sixpence,” he said, “whatever that is.”
